Alongside natural disasters and pandemics, the Swiss government regards migration as a risk demanding
preparedness.[1] Official emergency planning documents lay out a scenario where an
influx of refugees seriously endangers public safety. While this may not be a threat in the conventional sense, they say, there is no room for complacency.

A Swiss newspaper of July 5, 2015, describes a country looking to close itself off. A supposedly eternal nation is
held aloft, while there seems to be no place for Switzerland in the interconnected global village. The author calls for a shift in the narrative, a systematic, coherent national history for a
nation whose success rests on learning and change.Max Frisch discusses the meaning of Heimat, or homeland, in his acceptance
speech for the 1974 Schiller Prize for literature. What does Heimat consist of, he asks: bricks and mortar, landscape as “the stage of life,” dialect as marker of (not) belonging,
ideology, literature, territory?[2]

Matters of Negotiation approaches Switzerland from the margins, circling along the country’s
territorial limits. Where does Switzerland begin, and where does it end? Who lives within, and who remains without? What conflicts arise through the drawing of borders? And how are frontiers
defined, modified, defended and overcome?